You Must Grow From the Inside Out

An ancient Indian fable talks about a timid mouse.  The town mouse was afraid of the town cat, the sorcerer taking pity on the mouse decided to change the appearance of the mouse to a cat.  But without changing the heart of the mouse he was now afraid of the town dog.  So again the sorcerer took pity and changed the mouse into a dog, now the mouse in a dog shell feared the lion, so he was changed into a lion only to be afraid of the next animal…

As I was told this fable I immediately began to think of the restaurant industry, as I do when reading anything motivational.  All too often a restaurant will fail but before it does the owner dumps gobs of money into the things that don’t matter. Paint, furniture, pictures etc… do not make a great restaurant.  People do!   If you don’t train your staff to take customer service to the highest level every day, every shift then you will ultimately fail.

As I look at the Birmingham restaurant scene, we have closed establishments, opened them and changed appearances of others.  Until a company has the heart of a lion it cannot transform its mouse-like shell.  At the rugby grille we are fortunate to say that we truly have a heart of a lion.  For years we have been working to stay on the culinary edge by updating menus, watching trends, buying new equipment… It has paid off!  Monday we break ground on our expansion.  This is not changing our shell to mask fear, this is growing our shell because it cannot contain the size of our lion-like heart.  Birmingham has asked us for more dining space and we have responded.

Stay tuned to future articles, we are developing new menus and recipes that I will be sharing with everyone.

The most effective way to cope with change is to help create it-L.W. Lynett